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A Good Result That Raises Questions, Google Uncovers Child Porn in Gmail

News surfaced last week that a Houston, TX man was charged with possession of child pornography. Everyone would call his apprehension a positive story, but the mechanics of uncovering his offending might raise some questions.

It seems that John Skillern, a 41 year old chef at Denny’s, was sending explicit photos of a young girl and using his Gmail account to do so. The detective in charge of the case, David Nettles, said that GoogleGoogle “detected” the existence of the photo and tipped off police who subsequently obtained a warrant and found objectionable images on Skillern’s computers. In the video that accompanies the story, Nettles professes to having no idea how Google uncovered the image and not really caring how it happened. In his position that makes sense, but there are some legal and moral reasons why the process to identify this content is important.

US federal law requires companies to report child abuse should they discover it – this extends to photo studios, processing shops and, of course, technology companies. But how those images are discovered is the question. It has been suggested that Google stores a database of images obtained from police databases and uses that database to find messages within email messages – in essence this would amount to an automated child pornography detection system. But what else is it detecting at the same time?

Obviously email scanning to prevent child abuse is a good use of technology, but there are some moral questions about the email scanning that allows it to occur. A few months ago Google announced that it would no longer scan emails in order to deliver advertisements – if this scanning is indeed still occurring, and notwithstanding this particular positive benefit that scanning can bring, questions will be raised in terms of privacy. Last year Google’s head lawyer wrote in The Telegraph about the broader uncovering of child pornography:

We have co-funded the Internet Watch Foundation for the last nine years [...] proactively identifying child abuse images that Google can then remove from our search engine. We also work with Interpol and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States, amongst others. And since much of this illegal material is circulated repeatedly – making the crime infinitely worse for the victims – we have built technology that trawls other platforms for known images of child sex abuse. We can then quickly remove them and report their existence to the authorities

It seems that Gmail might be one of those “other platforms” that Google is scanning. That’s fine in the context of child pornography, but not so much in other, more commercial, contexts.

Something tells me that Google would have much rather that this story never saw the light of day.

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Google is far from alone. Many tech companies scan messages for child porn. Facebook has been doing it since 2012: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/07/13/yes-facebook-scans-peoples-private-conversations-looking-for-sexual-predators-and-child-porn/ A round up of companies that scan for and report child porn passed around on their platforms was actually the lead on a story I recently did about Twitter’s head of safety and trust: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/07/02/meet-del-harvey-twitters-troll-patrol/

There is no doubt that child molesters should be tracked down , but this is the wrong way of going about it. This is no different than opening my private mail or standing in my yard looking through my windows. Its creepy. Google needs to have something that says “I consent to Google looking through my emails” if they are going to do this.

It’s amazing how people will let Google — an unelected business enterprise, accountable to no one except its shareholders and driven only by profit — do things that they would absolutely rail against if their elected government were doing them.

Imagine if the federal government were driving around with camera cars taking pictures of homes and businesses along every road in the U.S., or (as in this case) scanning the contents everyone’s email. Google provides useful services by these activities, as might the U.S. government. Yet nobody would tolerate the government doing it, while blissfully accepting Google doing the same thing.

Seriously, take this story of Google identifying a child pornographer as a result of systematically scanning everyone’s email. Now change the word “Google” to “FBI”. Can you imagine the uproar?! “FBI arrests child porn offender thanks to blanket scanning of citizens’ email accounts; sees potential for expanded use of this system to identify criminal activity.” Intolerable, right? But you go for it, Google! Keep scanning and tracking me, even though I have no say in who you are or what you do with my info.